Beginning by Looking Back
Reflecting on ‘second generation’ experience, the ‘second generation’ here being the children of Holocaust survivors, Eva Hoffman leads us straight into the question of what it means to inherit suffering, and indeed what it means to ‘inherit’ another’s experience at all.
And yet, at the same time, this is exactly the crux of the second generation’s difficulty: that it has inherited not experience, but its shadows. The uncanny, in Freud’s formulation, is the sensation of something that is both very alien and deeply familiar, something that only the unconscious knows. If so, then the second generation has grown up with the uncanny. And sometimes, it needs to be said, wrestling with shadows can be more frightening, or more confusing, than struggling with solid realities. (Hoffman 2005, p. 66)
What are these ‘shadows’ to which Hoffman refers? Are they the experiences that the parental generation has had, passed on through their observable actions – the stories they told their children about their lives, their overprotection or silent avoidances, their investment in and ambitions for their children (‘not letting Hitler win’ – Hoffman 2005, p. 66)? Or are they something communicated more subtly, as if through a kind of telepathic process, whereby the material implanted in the child is impossibly strange and disturbingly incomprehensible, and so remains like this, shadowing psychic life? To what extent, we might also ask, is this kind of shadowing a specific heritage of those ‘traumatic’ experiences that cannot be talked about easily, but are freighted with a significance that might not be interpretable to those who have not actually lived them? Is it ever possible to absorb such experiences if one has not been there oneself, or is it only people who have been through a traumatic experience who can appreciate fully what it means? A terrible, dark Jewish joke quoted by Devorah Baum captures some of the essence of this difficulty, albeit framed in pain and theological bitterness.
Elie Wiesel goes up to Heaven, meets God. He tells God a Holocaust joke: God doesn’t laugh. Wiesel shrugs: ‘I guess you had to be there.’ (Baum 2017, p. 46)
This ‘joke’ is about theodicy: God cannot have been present at Auschwitz. But it also plays on the question of identification with suffering: is it possible to ‘get the joke’ if one has not had the experience oneself, but only engaged with its consequences indirectly? Yet if this is not possible, then the meaning of such experiences will rarely be conveyable from one person to another, and the testimonies of those who were directly involved have to be received in silence, without anyone else having the authority to comment or speak about how they have been affected. No-one else would be able to claim understanding, because only those who have gone through the events have testimonies that can count. There are some who argue this way; even Primo Levi, whose literary witnessing has possibly had more impact than anyone else’s, doubted that he could speak in the name of those who had perished. Here is the famous passage on this issue, much quoted and referenced and on the whole assented to whilst also being denied:
I must repeat – we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. This is an uncomfortable notion, of which I have become conscious little by little… We who were favoured by fate have tried, with more or less wisdom, to recount not only our fate, but also that of the others, the submerged; but this was a discourse ‘on behalf of third parties,’ the story of things seen from close by, not experienced personally. When the destruction was terminated, the work accomplished was not told by anyone, just as no one ever returned to recount his own death. (Levi 1988, pp. 63–4)
This is a very powerful comment and it has fuelled some influential thinking on the nature of witnessing, for example Giorgio Agamben’s (2002) evocation of the figure of the ‘Muselmann’ as the one who is too close to death to testify, yet precisely because of this is the only ‘true’ witness of the appalling event. However, it is clear from the immense readership that Levi’s books have had and their status as paradigmatic testimonies that his challenge, despite being ‘repeated’, has not been fully absorbed. Or at least, his and others’ attempts to speak ‘on behalf of third parties’ have largely been treated with proper seriousness and respect. All this is to say, it does seem possible to convey something of the experience; and if this is not the whole story, if we can never know for sure what would have been said by those who cannot speak, there is sufficient in these testimonies to be getting along with. Maybe the ‘shadows’ that Hoffman refers to apply here: the shadows thrown by experiences may not be the experiences themselves, but they have the shape and possibly even the texture of those experiences, and they seem capable of passing across boundaries, of seeping from one person to another. In addition, it is possible that the shadows, examined closely, also make the original experiences visible to those who might not otherwise be able to look directly at them.
Discussing intergenerational connections and the meaning of the passing of a generation, Lisa Baraitser (2017) makes a link between the experience of being affected by something one cannot quite identify and the processes of reflection embedded in the practice of psychoanalysis. She writes (p. 102) that the ‘attempt to make sense of something that one knows has occurred, and yet in some profound way one seems to have missed, is at the core of a psychoanalytic sensibility in which events come to be significant after an originary event that has bypassed memory and language.’ According to Baraitser, this experience is at the heart of what Freud refers to as ‘historical truth’, ‘the indelible trace of experience on the psyche prior to the capacity for the event to be encoded in a recallable way, a trace that can only be reproduced rather than remembered, as its original form is lost.’ This is a complicated idea, but it seems to introduce into ordinary life something that is more often seen as confined to the experience of trauma. Traumatic experiences are held to be too overpowering to be grasped as they occur, so instead they are somehow ‘gone through’ without being properly processed, ‘becoming significant’, as Baraitser puts it, only later on if it becomes possible to think about them in a calmer way, with more perspective or distance. The existence of such experiences seems undeniable. Freud’s (1920) post-World War One examination of traumatic dreams showed how they constitute a repeated return to the scene of suffering, maybe as a way of trying to deal with it – to master it in important ways or even (considering that we are talking about bad dreams) to wake up from it. Faced with suffering that we cannot fully understand, we either shut ourselves off from it (denial and forgetting of troubling occurrences being prevalent in everyday life), or we keep worrying away at it until it begins to make some sense. What Baraitser suggests, however, is that this is a psychoanalytic norm: everything happens later than it should. The actual experience is missed yet still remains, not as a ‘memory’ but as some kind of an ‘event.’
Baraitser here is drawing on the ideas put forward by the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche (1999), whose dual notions of the traumatic origin of psychic life and of ‘afterwardsness’ have become increasingly influential. The key ideas are, first, that the experience of the infant as recipient of ‘enigmatic’ messages from adult carers institutes a lifelong process of a kind of failed decoding characterised by the sense that there is something that we know is important, yet always escapes us. At the start of life, the carer communicates messages to the child, many of which are interpretable as messages of love, concern, enjoyment and the like; but some messages are not ‘coded’ in a way that is translatable, because they are infiltrated by the carer’s own unconscious and consequently carry too great a charge for the infant to comprehend. These ‘enigmatic’ messages are hidden away, and function as sources of puzzlement and excitement, an unconscious itch that surreptitiously makes itself felt and never quite disappears. The second idea is that these enigmatic messages can only be understood, to the extent that they can be understood at all, retrospectively: this happened, it needs to be managed, it needs to be made sense of, now I can understand it a little and also see how it has affected me all these years. Baraitser elaborates on Laplanche here, distinguishing between two types of time, ‘linear time’ and a kind of ‘left-over’ time.
There is linear time that is produced by binding events together to make discourse, and another time which is not exactly ‘timeless’ but rather, a collection of left-over bindings (should we say post-temporal?), now unbound that characterizes unconscious time. What instigates both binding and unbinding, according to Laplanche, is the infant’s contact with the enigmatic codes or signifiers from the adults involved in early care… Each generation is brought into time by attempting to bind the ‘bindings without binding’ of the adults that preceded them, a dialectical and mutually metamorphosing process. (Baraitser 2017, p. 104)
The intergenerational elements of this complex account are important and provide a mechanism to explain the continuity of memory and identity over time that is probably more successful than Freud’s own reliance on the idea that there is some kind of genetic transmission of the experience of trauma from one period to another (Freud 1913, 1939). In Freud’s version of things, the trauma of the murder of the ‘primal father’ (which supposedly happened in reality in pre-history) is re-experienced in each generation, laying down a template that fuels the excessive response each person has to t...